Sermon by the Revd Canon Alistair Macdonald-Radcliff for the Third Sunday of Easter, April 19, 2026

In the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Ghost.

Was it not necessary that the Christ should suffer these things and enter into glory?

Thus does the revised standard version of the Bible render the text of Luke 24.26 a slightly sharper version than the one familiar to us from the King James Authorized Version, highlighting the underlying theme of today's gospel, which essentially invites us to explore how God's necessity and human freedom coincide in Christ, through his life, passion, and resurrection, and then consequently in the church's life, which is to say in each of us.

But at the outset, it's worth noting the way in which Luke's account of the road to Emmaus is overall a narrative of extraordinary literary control and theological depth.

Told only in Luke and set just later on Easter Sunday itself, immediately after the resurrection.

Part of its rhetorical power lies in the way that Luke repeatedly uses what is technically known as a chiastic pattern.

For example, running from the women at the tomb through the conversation on the road to Emmaus, then back to Jerusalem, showing a textual as well as a geographical pivot in the question, was it not necessary?

Thus we can understand the disciples' departure from Jerusalem as, in essence, an anti-pilgrimage, which is then reversed when they return after recognizing Jesus.

Their turning back enacts repentance and restored sight.

Another important dimension in Luke is the way in which the mere presentation of facts, as we see with women, angels, empty tomb, does not of itself bring insight.

That is why for us it is only when Scripture is reread as a pattern of divine necessity, just as for the followers in the gospel, illumination came with the embodied action of Christ in the Eucharistic gesture that their eyes and eyes truly opened.

Moreover, the story is shaped by movement, as I've just suggested, and that movement is not incidental but interpretive.

The disciples are leaving Jerusalem in grief.

Jesus joins them on the road, and the encounter sends them back, as I said, to the city with a new understanding.

And while the episode is carefully structured, with the central fact not merely that the disciples finally recognize Jesus, but also that the risen Jesus has already drawn near to them before they understand anything.

Thus, Luke therefore presents resurrection faith not as human deduction, but as an event of divine initiative.

So literally, as the story unfolds, Christ comes first, but comprehension follows later.

Luke also fills the passage with irony, beginning with the disciples' assumption that the stranger, as they take him to be, is the only person ignorant of recent events, when in fact, of course, he is the only one who truly knows their meaning.

Their failure to recognize Jesus is described not as a defect in his body, but as a withholding of perception, which allows Luke to dramatize the difference between seeing facts and understanding reality.

The result is a profound inversion.

The disciples can narrate the passion, the empty tomb, and the women's report, yet they still do not grasp the truth standing disciple.

So we see it as a very subtle and deft theological presentation.

But as we think about in this story, but as we think about Luke as a whole, it confronts us at once, as I suggested at the opening, with a deep mystery that lies close to the heart of Christian faith, which is just how God's sovereign purpose on the one hand and human freedom on the other meet.

And that's not an abstract philosophical puzzle, for it affects how we understand the very shape of salvation, the meaning of discipleship, and the way God deals with us in and through Christ.

In the Gospel of Luke, this mystery appears time and again.

The Gospel repeatedly makes clear that Jesus was walking a path already known to the Father on the one hand, while on the other, at every stage, men and women around him were making real choices to believe or resist, to repent or to harden their hearts, to follow or to turn away.

The divine will, in other words, is quite clear and certain.

By contrast, our human response is free and uncertain.

It's striking and important that in Luke, at the very beginning of Jesus' public ministry, he enters the synagogue in Nazareth and takes up the scroll, and the scroll he takes up is that of Isaiah, a book constantly referred to in relation to the unfolding narrative in Luke and the Gospel.

And he reads words of promise, of good news to the poor, release to the captive, sight to the blind, freedom for the oppressed, all things pointing to good things possible in this world, in other words, to realized eschatology, as the theologians would say.

And after that, Jesus says, Today this scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing.

Now that was a remarkable sentence at that point.

Or Jesus, through it, made clear that his ministry was not random, not improvised, not merely the result of some movement of, let us say, personal religious enthusiasm.

Instead, it was a decisive declaration that he, Jesus, was the fulfillment of God's promise in the Old Testament of the Messiah, and thus that the cosmic redemptive plan of God was unfolding in him.

This matters deeply, for it means that when we look at the life of Christ, we are seeing the faithfulness of God at work.

The Lord does not merely react to human history.

In Christ, he enters into it in a very specific way with purpose.

He does not merely observe the world's brokenness, he moves toward it in mercy, moved by love.

Then again, in the Gospel, right at the end, on the very night of his betrayal, we see too that Jesus knows what is coming.

He is not surprised, nor is he overpowered by some abstract force of fate.

The cross is not an accident of Judeo-Roman politics or an unfortunate misunderstanding.

It is part of the salvific purposes of God.

Yet throughout, all that happens does so with participants who are free and able to choose to act as they do, including Christ Himself, the unique man who was also divine.

In a sense, this makes the horror of the cross yet more painful.

It does not make evil less evil, yet it also reveals that human sin, however dire its consequences, cannot overthrow the will of God, and ultimately that what we human creatures intend for destruction, God orders towards redemption.

As is all too evident, we live in a world that is unstable, confusing, morally disordered.

Yet Luke's gospel makes clear that God's purpose endures, that it is not fragile.

History does not unfold without meaning, and God is not absent from the world in all its woes and grief.

And Luke also shows us plainly that we, as God's creatures, made in his image, have autonomy, and are thus also, let us note, responsible actors in the great cosmic drama of salvation.

We, through history, may refuse and even reject, as did the people of Israel, let us remember remember repeatedly in the Old Testament.

But we can also repent.

We are also able freely to believe.

And this points to something quite fundamental.

If God's purpose were the only thing that mattered, then human words of warning and invitation would be meaningless.

But in Luke, the gospel is clearly addressed to real people, like us, who have to respond.

Jesus wept over Jerusalem because of the rejection its fate represented.

Ultimately, the city lay condemned and ruined.

Ultimately, as so often in the case of human sin and waywardness, not for lacking information, but for resisting grace.

In Luke, we see that time and time again Jesus is confronted with different responses, as we see on the road to a mess.

As the gospel unfolds again and again, some see, some rejoice, some follow, some do not, some question, some are healed and give thanks, some go away sad.

Some seek him for truth, others seek even to trap and ensnare Jesus.

The same, Christ thus produces different responses, not because his word is unclear, but because we human beings are divided within ourselves.

The gospel does not treat us like stones, passive objects of fate.

Instead, the gospel addresses us, commands repentance, and invites faith.

But this in turn, when we add it all up theologically, leaves us accountable.

There is a temptation in every age to explain away responsibility and to say the circumstances may be.

That goes all the way back, remember, to the Garden of Eden.

But the gospel does not allow us this escape.

The human will matters.

Our choices matter.

Our yes or our no matters, and can have eternal consequences.

And central here is our response, of course, to Christ.

This can never be a matter of performance or outward show in deference to what those around us seek.

In the end, it can only be our own decision, as can the living out in the life of what that entails, which should follow, which is to say, for each of us in our individual vocation.

Grace abounds, as the great phrase has it, and we are indeed surrounded by grace, and can even be awakened by grace.

But it is still for us to respond to the call of Christ, and this brings us back to the whole meaning of freedom.

If we want to understand freedom rightly, we need only to look at Jesus himself.

In him we see not independence from God, but perfect obedience to God the Father.

In Luke's account of his temptation in the desert, we see that Jesus was offered real alternative choices and even ways to escape.

He was invited to take power without suffering, glory without the cross, earthly kingship without obedience, but each time he refused.

He responded to every temptation by seeing through it, and with trust in God the Father.

He does not use his potential freedom to escape the will of God the Father, he uses his freedom to fulfill that will.

A prayer that is one of the most profound.

It was not the prayer, however, of a man crushed by fate.

That was the prayer of the Son who freely loved the Father and submits to the consequences of his will.

This entailed that Jesus did not submit because he had no choice.

He submitted because his choice was that of love.

His freedom was not some right to do whatever he pleased, it was the blessed capacity to will and unite with the Father's saving purpose.

All of which brings us to the great paradox at the heart of Christianity.

Our tendency is always to think of freedom as about maximal choice and being able to do anything at all ideally.

But Jesus shows that freedom is not mere independence and maximal choice.

Freedom is the ability to live in truth, to be truly ourselves, the truth wherein we can be most fully what we are called to be.

And that is to enter our true vocation, wherein we love God and give ourselves and our lives in trust to his divine will.

Jesus Christ thus stands as the ultimate example of what this means.

The Father's saving purpose is necessary, certain, unbreakable, and the Son's human obedience was free, willing, loving, and complete.

Thus did in Jesus necessity and freedom meet.

They are united in the life of perfect sonship, which was in entire unity with the divine will.

But we always want to ask if God's will and purpose is certain and absolute, then do our choices matter?

And if our choices matter, how can God's purpose be certain and absolute?

Luke, in response, upholds both realities that are important here before us.

On the one hand, the cross was the ultimate consequence, was ultimately consequent upon, and thus determined by God's saving plan.

On the other hand, those who betrayed and crucified Jesus freely chose to do as they did and to act wickedly as they did, and they were morally responsible for those actions and their choices.

All of which presents not a contradiction, but a mystery, to which we are called to respond while rejecting.

On the one hand, fatalism, which says nothing really matters because the end is fixed and our choice is unreal, and on the other hand, the sins of pride and presumption, which invite us to the opposite extreme of supposing that everything depends on us, including in the end meaning itself, as though the world were of our own devising.

Again, Luke will not allow either of these.

We are creatures, we are dependent, we live by grace.

Salvation comes from God, not from self-creation.

We act and our actions matter.

But God in the end is indeed God, and we are not.

We are responsible, but we are not sovereign.

We choose, but our choosing is always within the larger providence of God.

Which brings us finally to the profoundest paradox, which is that grace is not the reward for our free choice and action.

Rather, grace is that which makes our free and faithful response possible.

Authentic freedom, as we Christians understand it, is not freedom from all constraint, as I have pointed out, but freedom to be fully ourselves, which we can only be as God's creatures, in unity with, which is to say, in communion with God.

Remember, it was the act of communion that was as the point, or was the point at which the followers recognized Christ in his breaking of bread, and that has very deep resonances.

True freedom does not lie in self-assertion, which is ultimately the path of isolation and solitism, but rather in unity with the ultimate good, which is life in unity with the vision and love of God, which will be attained, of course, most fully in the beatific vision, which is that of the life to come.

All of which has profound implications for our daily lives and what it means to live in faith and indeed to live in the joy of Easter.

First, we should trust God's providence, no matter our worldly concerns and very natural anxieties.

Second, we should take our own choices seriously.

We are indeed called to repentance for our wrong choices, but also to embrace the forgiveness Christ brought to us through his sacrifice on the cross.

And thirdly, we need to live into what freedom truly is, remembering that there is no deeper freedom than to say, not my will, but yours be done.

And fourth, we should rejoice that our salvation does not depend on the fragility of our will, but is the gift of God.

Recall the words of the introit who be joyful in God all ye lands, hallelujah, sing praises unto the honor of his name.

Hallelujah.

Make his praise to be exceeding glorious.